Dell Alienware X51, SFF PC Gaming Refined

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Metro 2033 and STALKER Benchmarks

First up for in-game performance testing, we have Metro 2033 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., both of which are absolute murder on graphics cards in terms of workload but also boast impressive cutting-edge visuals.

Metro 2033

DX11 Gaming Performance

Metro 2033

Metro 2033 is your basic
post-apocalyptic first person shooter game with a few rather
unconventional twists. Unlike most FPS titles, there is no health meter
to measure your level of ailment, but rather you’re left to deal
with life, or lack there-of more akin to the real world with blood
spatter on your visor and your heart rate and respiration level as
indicators. The game is loosely based on a novel by Russian Author
Dmitry Glukhovsky. Metro 2003 boasts some of the best 3D visuals on the
PC platform currently including a DX11 rendering mode that makes use of
advanced depth of field effects and character model tessellation for
increased realism.

First, in the immortal word of Ricky Ricardo, we have a little bit of "splaining to do." As you'll notice we only have numbers from the X51 for our 1080p resolution. For the other full sized systems we didn't have the reference numbers on hand at 1080p but you can certainly garner a view of performance based on the other two resolutions. Here the Alienware X51 stacks up much like it did in the 3DMark 11 test, besting two of the full-sized gaming systems but not quite catching the Radeon HD 6850 power HP rig.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Call of Pripyat

DX11 Gaming Performance

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Call
of Pripyat is the third game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series and throws in
DX11 to the mix. This benchmark is based on one of the locations found
within the latest game. Testing includes four stages and utilizes
various weather conditions, as well as different time of day settings.
It offers a number of presets and options, including multiple versions of
DirectX, resolutions, antialiasing, etc. SunShafts represents the most
graphically challenging stage available. We conducted our testing with
DX11 enabled, multiple resolutions, and Ultra settings.

STALKER shows a different result with the Alienware X51 taking the lead position at all resolutions. This test is a little less demanding versus Metro 2033's gauntlet but its interesting to see the GeForce GTX 555 in the tiny X51 actually powers it past the other full-sized systems.